Richard Borcherds is a British mathematician at Berkeley, who won the 1998 Fields Medal for the proof of the monstrous moonshine conjecture among many other contributions. A couple months ago, Borcherds posted on YouTube a […]
Category: scottaaronson
Last week I got an email from Dina Katabi, my former MIT colleague, asking me to call her urgently. Am I in trouble? For what, though?? I haven’t even worked at MIT for five years! […]
Oded Goldreich is a theoretical computer scientist at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel. He’s best known for helping to lay the rigorous foundations of cryptography in the 1980s, through seminal results like the Goldreich-Levin […]
My son Daniel had his fourth birthday a couple weeks ago. For a present, he got an electric train set. (For completeness—and since the details of the train set will be rather important to the […]
For years, I’d sometimes hear discussions about the ethics of quantum computing research. Quantum ethics! When the debates weren’t purely semantic, over the propriety of terms like “quantum supremacy” or “ancilla qubit,” they were always […]
Many of you will have seen the happy news today that Avi Wigderson and László Lovász share this year’s Abel Prize (which now contends with the Fields Medal for the highest award in pure math). […]
Back at MIT, whenever I taught my graduate course on Quantum Complexity Theory (see here for lecture notes), I had a tradition of showcasing the student projects on this blog: see here (Fall 2010), here […]
Many of you have surely already seen the news that the Kouwenhoven group in Delft—which in 2018 published a paper in Nature claiming to have detected Majorana particles, a type of nonabelian anyon—have retracted the […]
So there’s an interesting new paper on the arXiv by Feng Pan and Pan Zhang, entitled “Simulating the Sycamore supremacy circuits.” It’s about a new tensor contraction strategy for classically simulating Google’s 53-qubit quantum supremacy […]
As I lay bedridden this week, knocked out by my second dose of the Moderna vaccine, I decided I should blog some more half-baked ideas because what the hell? It feels therapeutic, I have tenure, […]
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